I beat this earlier… 199 hoard, 15 kingdom, t7x8 – 2 extra purchases on faction team
2xmechataur 2xking.
In final fight, the armour dude was last one left and he took a painfully long time.
… That has literally nothing to do with the banners. Nothing at all.
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It’s the faction’s banner. It give more mana per match. I’m thinkin’, yeah, this time it does.
How does this make any sense at all given
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other factions just as difficult (if not more so) exist that weren’t likewise given unbalanced banners and
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the opponent benefits from the banner in equal proportion to the player, making the “advantage” not at all advantageous (at best it’s a wash—at worst it makes the enemy more dangerous because they can do more with the extra than you can)
?
The banner is unbalanced and the minus should be minus 2 (or even 3) to balance it. The effect (or lack thereof) it has on the playing of the faction itself is irrelevant to the point being made.
There is other factions even harder than this faction that did not get +2/+2/-1 banners. Why that?
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This faction is particularly confusing and I can only imagine the frustrations that android users are experiencing. I hope that their investment us reimbursed and the event is rerun as a 3 day gig when visuals have been fixed. The rest of us have frustrations of our own of course. Very poor damage output and an opposition troop that is very hard to kill. Its all very well saying “just silence it” but that is of course down to RNG so doesn’t really represent a meaningful strategy. Is the banner real? Because that just exacerbates the difficulty in killing what is most likely to be the final enemy troop. Nobody wants a fight that can last an hour. I did pure 200 (1x tier 7 at that point) and that was a clear and depressing example of difficulties later to come. I used to enjoy gems a lot but design like this makes my imminent departure all the more urgent. In the words of the sex pistols… “No fun”.
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I’ll be finishing this faction tomorrow so will be able to give my stats/thoughts then. Currently I’m at hoard 100, kingdom 14 and 5x T7.
I agree with all the issues that have been brought up:
- Actual path not matching maze image
- Missing image making it extremely annoying to determine your troop and enemy troops with all the scrambling (mobile or at least android users)
Yet I can’t get behind the complaint about tank vs tank. If that happens to you, I’m sorry. But the same thing could happen in any other faction (Having only Copycats in Mirrored Halls, having only Grave Seer in Crypt Keepers, etc). Sure, not an exact replica because for those you theoretically can skull down your opponents. Maybe a better example would be Stonesong Eyrie with those damned Harpies.
I guess what I mean to say is that fun is relative. Maybe I’ll hate this faction tomorrow when I attempt 500.
However, I am really annoyed by the lack of QA that’s been happening. I can play with deformed and missing images, with spells that don’t do exactly what they should be doing, with incorrect bonuses, dancing world event icons, [insert long list of current bugs]. Yet they’ve been happening more and more to the point where no where is safe from them. It’s one thing to say “oh, casting Haunted Guardian does a 3x5 column on 3-4x instead of the 5x5 without corners” because that’s one troop that I don’t really use outside of events. But now it’s everywhere.
If you can’t keep up with the new content while still ensuring QA, slow it down, hire more people, etc. Many of the bugs are critical and could be noticed/resolved with just a little more QA. I would be happy to have waited another week to do this faction (doing Raid this weekend instead) if it meant that it had images and the spells did what they said they did (mostly Mechataur). Yet, since this seems to only be happening on Android (haven’t heard people talking about iOS), maybe Android is a much smaller playerbase than I expected.
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It’s absolutely a factor in that it affects how effectively you can mana block the cpu. Sure you may share the same banner, but the cpu has an incredible stats advantage. The most annoying troop in this delve, Horned Guardian, uses both red and green, both getting +2 from banner. Normally, the banner would have only one +2 and one +1. So normally, if you were mana blocking, you’d match the one the cpu gets +2 from slowing its rate of filling. That’s not possible in this case, meaning the banner is directly increasing the difficulty
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…which is exactly what I said 
Follow the thread; if an orc like myself can do it, I have every confidence you can as well:
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Shimrra points out the banner is unbalanced (and for no good reason, at that, given other banners already have the same color choices)
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AmazonJax claims the reason for this is due to the difficulty of the faction (so I guess what was meant might have been “in order to make a difficult faction even harder,” but what was written leads me and, I think, others like Eika to read “it’s to help the player get more mana in order to overcome this more difficult faction,” which is why…)
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…I then pointed out that reasoning doesn’t make sense precisely because of the reasons you’ve expounded: that it makes the CPU harder to mana-block more than it helps the player fuel their own troops, which is a problem thanks to the massive stats-gap between player and CPU.
In any case — whether the banner hurts or helps the player remains irrelevant to the issue originally brought up about the banner itself being a strange outlier in terms of net mana gains/costs with no good reason for existing (unless one somehow thinks it would be “good” to introduce an unbalanced banner into the game for the first time ever solely to make a single delve harder to complete).
/rant
Tl,dr: there shouldn’t be +2, +2, -1 banners in the game, as it disrupts established balance. To correct, the banner should read +2, +2, -2 (and have a net +2 mana bonus like every other banner in the game)
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Just buy more tiers and bruteforce. right? right?
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Faction is still bull shit. 
Just for the record times 8 due to the bugs.
(Tier 7, 3 times, Kingdom level 15, Hoard Level Level 188, 2 Nysha 1 Orpheus Used.
First Run used with this team. Lost the first Run using King Minos and Mechataur x3.)
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I can’t tell if it is my internet, or GoW servers, but I dc’d 3 times during the 7 quest battles, and again during the final room on Delve Lvl 60.
I did manage to beat everyone else to the number one spot, if only for a day.
Obviously it won’t last, and I’m already down to third, but I find the game hurting my eyes again. And if it is going to dc on me, I’d rather just continue fighting in Mordor.
Good luck all. For the Horde.
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This faction does have a good lesson on high level delving…which is board control.
Of the 4 troops, you immediately lose 1 because exploders are bad at 500. They’ll backfire more often than not.
You also lose the armor troop cuz you cant guarantee a useful order after room 1.
That leaves you with 2 troops that are viable. After that, its left to the final delve lesson … luck.
Lol
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The fact that you made @xolid99 use potions speaks triple integral volumes…
Whatever the devs might say and have said in the past, I’m sure it would have a good deal of therapeutic value for them to stream pure faction 500 attempts on an ordinary account. If nothing else, we might have a glimpse what the expected hoard levels are.
And releasing broken stuff? Why is it that I’m not scratching my head in surprise?
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So I guess I don’t need to do that tier II room?
Okay so the maze goes past that room along the top. Its still highly questionable from a UI perspective, maze or not.
Followup …
Opponent had troops 1 2 and 4 alive, 3 was dead. I aimed Mechataur at 2 and it silenced all three of them. Troop 4 shouldn’t have been silenced - it definitely wasn’t damaged …
Devs will never stream a pure 500 because they simply don’t do it in the same way that they don’t employ adequate QA. Game quality is appalling and player enjoyment horrific. Mid game is ace but end game is rubbish. Those poor folks who have spent 1000s leave me jaw dropped. At what point did value for money escape your psyche?
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Has there been any official comment about whether the +2G/+2R/-1P aspect of the banner is correct or not yet? When I first saw it I assumed it had to be a mistake and that it was intended to be +2G/+1R/-1P in line with the rest of the +2/+1/-1 banners. It would be odd to suddenly make one banner more beneficial than the rest.
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Negative…
I consider all changes now irrelevant. I have the choice to spend gems and complete the faction or the choice despite being at 500 not to bother. I chose option 2 followed by uninstall. The time has come to see the truth.
As @Shimrra pointed out, no official comment yet. With it being the weekend we shouldn’t expect to hear anything until tomorrow.
I think it is a mistake as well. If they meant this to be intended, I think the stream would’ve at least mentioned a banner surprise or something.
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